Continuing our ad hoc top five series, Jamshop principal and creative director Jim Robinson gets the most annoying adverts off his chest:
1. It’s hard to go past the Cadbury ads starring Professor Julius Sumner Miller, the scientist who coined the phrase “Why is it so”. The tenuous links to Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate were perhaps a perverse motivator for me to become a copywriter.
And then perhaps irritating is a better word for “Where do you get it”
2. Used for a variety of supermarkets around the country. This spawned a genre of brilliantly annoying retail ads from which we have never really recovered. Anthropologists will one day chart the decline of our civilization making reference to ads like one in Adelaide that sells shoes. But be warned, you’ll find this haunting ditty comes back to you time and time again like a bad rissole. Watch this video at your peril.
3. And there’s certainly no going past Jim’s Group. The levels of sophistication in this campaign knows no bounds. Over the years, we’ve progressed from ungainly clones walking out of a truck to the more recent bug-eyed pudgy Marios in towelling hats.
4. And who could forget last year’s Carefree offering, not so much annoying as unpleasant. Never mind 'vagina' the word, 'discharge' shouldn't be used in advertising.
5. But back to brain-numbingly annoying. The phenomenon of the business owner/presenter. They become legends in their own lobotomies. If you’ve ever stayed overnight in Adelaide you’ll have seen this guy. And believe me, with every ad, his hands have taken on a ‘Jimbo-esque’ disembodiment.
But for me, the most annoying ads of all time have to be funeral plan ads that tell us over and over that one day we are going to die. Duh. Such lack of insight, such dismissiveness raises the bar of annoyingness as it lowers our intelligence.
Every city in every county has particularly annoying ads. Why? Because we don’t know whether annoying is good or bad.
Success is measured in many ways. If you can’t be remembered for something great, just get remembered. At the very least, people will know you exist.
Or another way of saying that is: One man’s Kool-aid is another man’s poison.
Jim Robinson
Principal and Creative Director
Jamshop